Description

This volume examines how different generations of women work within the genericity of audio-visual storytelling not necessarily to ‘undo’ or ‘subvert’ popular formats, but also to draw on their generative force. Recent examples of filmmakers and creative practitioners within and outside Hollywood as well as women working in non-directing authorial roles remind us that women are in various ways authoring commercially and culturally impactful texts across a range of genres. Put simply, this volume asks: what do women who are creatively engaged with audio-visual industries do with genre and what does genre do with them? The contributors to the collection respond to this question from diverse perspectives and with different answers, spanning issues of direction, screenwriting, performance and audience address/reception.

Reviews

Long-listed for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Awards for 2018

"The edited volume Women Do Genre in Film and Television joins an ever-growing list of feminist reappraisals of popular culture that have emerged in the last decade, coinciding with a resurgent feminism that has come to permeate popular as well as counter-cultural media. This collection of essays will be especially welcomed by lecturers seeking to broaden their course reading list with material addressing women on screen beyond those appearing in American cinema and media. Notably the volume includes chapters by Barbara Zecchi on Spanish women filmmakers, Brigitte Rollet on women in French television, and Sanghita Sen on women in Bollywood. Also of interest are chapters on female comics such as Melissa McCarthy, from Frances Smith, and Lena Dunham, from Mary Harrod. In addition, the collection presents fresh perspectives on the role of the woman director and her engagement with traditionally male genres––with Linda Badley discussing director Mary Harron’s idiosyncratic biopics, E. Dawn Hall, director Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist Western Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, the 2013 remake of the classic horror film Carrie, directed by Kimberly Peirce. Other chapters cover topics such as the "Outlander" novel/television franchise (Jorie Lagerwey), female media fandom (Frances Coppa), 1990s "Dark Comedy" (Nicole Richter), Nancy Meyers’ 2000 What Women Want (Deborah Jermyn) and Nora Ephron’s 2009 Julie and Julia (Roberta Garrett). As such, the book offers a rich and varied resource for scholars working in the area of gender and the media." - Hilary Radner, University of Otago

"This book resoundingly answers today’s screaming need for rigorous feminist scholarship in film and television studies. The co-editors and contributors of Women Do Genre in Film and Television put forward a persuasive collective argument that gender is not merely an important element in contemporary conversations about genre, but indeed a constitutive one. The wide-ranging collection of chapters represented here, whose case studies contribute to a contemporary feminist theory of genre with global reach, ensures that this cornerstone anthology will assume a preferred place in screen studies research and pedagogy." -Julia Leyda, Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

"Women Do Genre represents a significant engagement with women’s uses of film and television genre, an engagement that proceeds from an understanding of genre’s capacity for self-reflexivity and self-renewal, rather than from the possibility of subversion. This collection of essays considers women’s encounters with screen genres in different geo-political contexts and across different forms and spaces of production, illuminating the complex ways in which feminism operates in moving image culture. A valuable and much–needed book for scholars and students of the screen." - Rachel Moseley, University of Warwick

Table of Contents

Preface (Christine Gledhill)

Introduction: Women’s Authorship and Genre in Contemporary Film and Television (Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz)

About the Series

Cultural and media studies are now well-established as important academic disciplines and are inspiring new research into a wide range of pertinent issues. This series presents outstanding research in these subjects, helping to shape the direction of future inquiry.